And I wouldn't bother to have such a site active on my laptop or phone any more than I would a website absent some emergency--in which case the website works as well as anything. And the government has no reliable way to push info out to me nor do I want it to have same--though maybe that's a US thing.

Well for now I don't bother having Twitter open on my laptop just in case my government would want to tell me something, so I don't see how this would be much different.

The main difference I see though is that since Mastodon provides RSS feeds, I could at least follow the feed of my country's emergency services without needing a specialised app.

RSS feeds are definitely an alternative but now you've covered ~1% (if that) of the population. I used to be an avid RSS consumer and even I don't really use it much any longer.

Apparently Twitter is used by 11% of the population here in Belgium, so that's certainly better but... how many of those follow accounts of the government? I suspect it's very low and most people probably don't even know all the levels that might potentially emit emergency warnings. I know I don't.

Given the general trust in American corporations, it's not absurd to think some of the 89% of the population that doesn't use Twitter would be more willing to install an application to follow official communication on Mastodon than to use Twitter.

Anyway warnings are just broadcast on the mobile network here, which works fine.

Yeah. Mobile phone alerts are probably about the best you can do these days beyond going house to house (and even then). You're never going to get to 100%. But, as you suggest, Twitter isn't even a particularly good channel. I use Twitter and I have no idea what my local government channels are, if any.

Even if you don't use it, you can check it during an emergency. Even if you don't check it, someone else else was checking it and relaying that information to you. You used to be able to search an account on an app you already have, and get the latest information. Now governments have to manage their own instances, you have to search their website, find the url, subscribe to it or download a custom app, and then you can finally see what used to be a search away from you.

That can only be described as a loss.

I can't get used to either Twitter or the fediverse, but they don't work differently on the discoverabilty aspect.

One would likely just subscribe to your city's hashtag for large cities or to your town hall's account for small ones, and that's all. The rest works like Twitter (except there is less risk of important posts getting invisibilised by the feed algorithm).

In my fediverse test, I just subscribed to #Antwerpen (as well as #Antwerp and #Anvers but that's a whole other problem...) and I did get relevant and interesting posts. In their small town my parents are subscribed to the town hall's Facebook account (the only reason they signed up to Facebook) and it would work the same on any other app, except it likely would spy on them a bit less. Mastodon's Android app is not a "more custom" app than Twitter or Facebook's apps are, on the contrary I would argue.

I just can't get used to checking this thing more than once every few days and like Twitter it just doesn't work if you're not constantly reading your feed, because then you're missing most posts.

At least there would be a central location. You would always know you could go there to learn more about government affairs. There should also be nothing preventing someone from mirroring GovTwitter to Twitter/Threads/Mastadon where the people are.

>At least there would be a central location

It's called a website.

Whose website? Does my local city have one? Do they have the IT resources to ensure it is hosted? Do they know how to get a .gov domain? What about state news? Lot of friction and multiple potential locations vs a Federally run resource.

> Does my local city have one?

It's hard to answer this question without knowing your local city. My town of < 5000 people has the appropriate .gov site set up and maintained; it's one of the responsibilities of the local government. I'd imagine that any local government structure large enough to have evacuation plans in place is also large enough to have a website to communicate those plans on...

I live in about a 7,000 person town and they have a website as, I assume, most if not all of the towns in the state do. I don't know how good they are with emergency notifications on the site but then we don't have a lot of emergencies requiring notification.

Yes, all of this stuff had normalized processes before Twitter emerged from SXSW.

Twitter is reliably real time. Yes, governments push information out in other ways, but it's unclear how real time it is. If you see a government account tweeting about a current event, you used to be able to assume that that was the latest information available.

This was especially useful for things like transit, or emergency situations. If there was a snowstorm, I would check the BC transit Twitter account. When there was an active shooter at my university, I checked the Ottawa RCMP Twitter account.

And I relayed that information to others, including people like you, making sure that even if you don't have Twitter you had the latest information. Now, Twitter can't be relied on for the latest information anymore. Government websites are not real time. There were millions of people using Twitter for this, and now they're no longer going to use the platform. This is absolutely a loss for the platform, no two ways about it.

I did not think this is what they meant from the comment, but I did immediately think it would be useful (and get around any 1st Amendment concerns) as you've suggested here: a platform exclusively for official communications from gov't at various levels / localities.

Everbridge is used by lots of governmental offices for this purpose.